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Friday, December 02, 2005

Galbraith on Speculative Episodes

"Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism. The human cost is not negligible, nor is the economic and socail effect. In the aftermath of 1929, the damage was great, and, ass noted, it contributed visibly to the depression that followed."

4 comments:

Galbraith does his best to explain what economists are generally not very well qualified to explain -- why do participants in a capitalist society keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over again? Some day I will have to talk to an anthropologist about this; repeated irrational descent into stupidity is something they are more likely to be able to explain.

Getstucco - There is a very highly regarded Harvard Economist who is attempting to quantify the psychological aspects of human behavior as it might (in his mind does) relate to traditional economic theory. He believes equations should be altered to account for this intangible.